One Direction: This Is Us

By ROBERT HAM

Victory laps in big-screen form are becoming the norm for the pop-music world, with superstars like Katy Perry and Justin Bieber blazing multimillion-dollar trails. So, it should come as little surprise that U.K. sensation One Direction was next in line for a glitzy combination of concert film and tour documentary. Instead, the surprise is how ridiculously enjoyable this whole publicity stunt manages to be. It helps that the boy band’s five members are as charming as can be, and quite often seem as awed by their meteoric rise to worldwide ubiquity as any right-thinking person would. And as with any documentary like this, it’s the human moments that keep things truly interesting: the five boys catching what sleep they can muster in an airport lounge, the brooding Zayn Malik looking close to tears as he talks to his mother on the phone. The rest of the picture is taken up with plenty of onstage footage during which One Direction strives to avoid every boy-band cliché in the book. There are no choreographed dance moves or matching outfits. Just five skinny lads trying to maintain their sanity and enjoy the spotlight while it lasts.